The Sounds of Service

Our little town makes a lot of noise, it’s rare to find a silent moment – maybe at night if the power is out, other than that there are also plenty of acoustic waves floating around. Music is omnipresent, blaring at max volume from poor quality overworked speakers that would have already been retired and discarded in any other part of the world. Here they continue to pump out mostly Chewa music from Zambia and Malawi, other parts of Mozambique focuses more on Portuguese and English language music. TVs are rare in site, but whoever owns one also has it on at all times at full volume. Conforming to this pattern, our school TV remains on even during faculty meetings, although we do turn down the volume. Daily tasks make a lot of noise. We hear loud bangs from people beating clothes on rocks during the washing process, the rythmic pounding of women grinding corn with gigantic mortars and pestles, the sounds of blowing and fanning of girls stoking cooking fires before meal times, the stirring sounds associated with making xima corn paste, the squeky pumping noise coming from the town water pumps or the sloshing of water being poured from wells into buckets, the scratchy sound of people using sand to scrap the black charcoal soot from their cooking utensils. Animals also have their own sounds. Here we mostly hear domestic animals like goats, pigs, chickens, turkeys, ducks, and dogs, but in the evenings we also hear birds and insects chirping, and frogs croaking. Less pleasant in the evenings is the high pitched buzzing of the notorious malaria vectors, mosquitos (luckily we have our net to keep this annoying and potentially scary noise out of our ears while we sleep). Plants make very pleasant noises when provoked by gentle breezes, but make more threatening noises in wind storms, while various creaking noises cause us to fear for the integrity of our home. Thunder can also be scary and very loud here, and our tin roof amplifies the sound of each tropical raindrop making us feel like we live in a drum line jam session during downpours.

People here are also very loud in general, not only when they are yelling at each other from across the neighborhood or laughing, but people carry on even normal conversations at very high decibel levels. Plus, no matter where you are, there are always babies crying not too far away or youngsters throwing tantrums, especially the little boys who are frequently spoiled, and children are always cackling away as they play their noisy games. The Nyau spirit channelers also contribute their own unearthly growling noises as they run the narrow streets of town beating their machetes. Different parts of town have their own sets of sounds. Our house always has the characteristic sounds of British accents from the BBC World Service. At the primary school you can always here kids chanting the vowel sounds and practicing reading syllables in unison, and at the secondary school we have our French and English students reciting their lessons in chorus. The main road through town has trucks barreling through making their deep diesel engine rumbles on their way back and forth between Malawi and the big Mozambican ports on the Indian Ocean, and the mini-buses zooming back and forth, loading up passengers bound for Tete have the high pitched sound all exhausted engines make when they are continuously operating just below overheating temperatures. Metal workers pounding out their wares next to the meat vendors un-sanitarily hacking away at their animal carcasses with axes and machetes provide various percussive sounds. The little bamboo hut movie theaters intentionally blare their kung fu or bollywood soundtracks into the streets to tempt pedestrians inside. Our newly completed mosque now contributes a loud call to prayer several times a day, broadcast from a large speaker poking out of one of the minarets. In the Catholic church, under the noise of all the singing and praying, you can hear the very subtle sound of breastfeeding from the myriad mothers with suckling babes.

But there are also plenty of sounds we don’t hear. No airplanes, no car alarms, no commuter traffic or honking, no freeway or mass transit sounds. There are no emergency response sirens. We do have an ambulance and our police chief has a motorcycle, but since there is no traffic for them to compete with, we have never heard them activate the whine of their sirens. We also miss out on some of the nuisances common in the big cities, like people yelling or hissing at us to get our attention, or street kids persistently begging for money in their most pathetic voices. Other than the humming of our fridge, we have no appliance noises, no vacuum cleaners, no washing machines, no driers, no microwaves beeping. People do love cellphones, and the few people who have them love showing off their ring tones when they receive calls – no silent modes here. There are no plumbing sounds, no water sprinkling, no showers, and definitely no toilets flushing. There are no havens from sound here, no libraries, no botanical gardens, no museums, no meditation rooms, no places to go to find and savor silence. To generalize, we believe Africa is usually louder than America, and people here don’t seem to mind the constant noise. Most people actually seem to enjoy it – maybe the ability to produce noise makes people in our small rural community feel more modern, or maybe it just reminds everyone that they are alive. Either way sometimes we would really like to enjoy a quiet moment, but giving that up is one of the sacrifices of being a Peace Corps volunteer.